I recently sat down with a group of women who wanted to talk about post-menopause. These women are therapists, intelligent women who have spent years working with people and understanding human behaviour, so I thought they knew. They didn’t.
They knew about the physical part of menopause, of course. The hormones and everything that happens in the body. That part is important and we have to deal with it, especially when the physical symptoms are difficult, but the physical changes are only one part of what is happening. Much deeper and intenser is what we are changing into.
The women I sat with were in what I call the negative post-menopause, where much of the anger comes from the feeling that there is nothing now. They felt unbeautiful, unseen and unvalued, and that negative feeling space had made the physical experience so much worse. As one of them put it, “Not only are we ignored, but we feel like shit as well.”
This is where so much of the menopause conversation sits. The major talk is about the suffering and there is a growing amount of scare propaganda. Then there is another sphere where women talk about empowerment and all that, but I think most women are still stuck in the negative because nobody has told them what comes next. Nobody has told them what post-menopause actually means, these women certainly had never been told.
So I told these women about the Matriarch.
Women after menopause become leaders and teachers, the wise ones, and leadership in this sense has nothing to do with being the boss, that’s a patriarchal construct. Leadership is responsibility for the welfare of the tribe, and everybody is part of the tribe. The responsibility of the Matriarch is to lead the tribe towards prosperity and safety, where people are safe, everybody has access to clean food, education and healthcare, and the tribe works together towards that goal.
During our childbearing years our energy is focused on the intimate group, on babies, children, partners, family and the people immediately around us. We are available. Then that part ends. We can’t have babies anymore and that whole bit is shut down, but the creative energy that went into it doesn’t disappear. It is the same creative energy that rises after menopause, just focused differently and it is strong.
Our energy begins to move inwards, towards Self, and that opens up a leadership energy that focus on the tribe rather than the small intimate group. By this stage we have experience, knowledge and a deep understanding of what a tribe needs. This is nature, it is not a construct. The construct is the version of womanhood we have been taught to live inside.
During our childbearing, available years we become constructs of the society around us, and we have been living inside patriarchal society for thousands of years. We are taught what women should be, how women should behave, what we are responsible for and what everybody else is entitled to expect from us. Women are not taught to listen to themselves, on the contrary, and 3,000 years of force and programming have silenced that inner voice to barely a whisper.
We need to understand the depth of that history because it didn’t begin with women being expected to do too much housework. Women were absolutely dependent on men for their existence. Her body, her children, her future and her life belonged to somebody else. Women lived with the risk of being locked up, hurt, cast out or losing their children. They could be sterilised and institutionalised, sold into marriage, tortured and burnt. They had no right to ownership, money, land or the other things that create safety and independence.
The horror is unmistakable, and it sits in us.
Inherited trauma is laced with fear. Every woman carries a fear of men, not only is it an imprint, it is also taught to us from a very early age. It is instinctual, the deep knowledge that says be careful, don’t trust, don’t make him angry, know when to keep silent. Speaking up can be dangerous. Saying no can be dangerous. Fighting can be dangerous. For thousands of years women learned through very real consequences that their survival depended upon men and that belonging entirely to themselves did not exist. For thousands of years women were prey.
History doesn’t disappear because laws change and women have rights. We can see the imprint in women’s relationships with money and ownership, in speaking up, saying no and fighting for ourselves. Women have more money issues than men, and underneath that sits the deep trauma of not being allowed to own.
What is confusing in the healing journey is that the trauma isn’t personal, it’s generational, making it so much harder to access, understand and release. As a woman accesses the original memory of herself, deep issues can begin to resolve because the old trauma starts losing some of its power over her.
Because we carry so much more than trauma. We also carry the Matriarch, the original imprint, where women began their existence before patriarchy. That memory is still there. It is not gone, it is shut down and we need to find it again.
This is one of the reasons post-menopause is so powerful. All the chatter begins to go. We stop being available to everybody else’s demands as the reproductive part is finished and the physical area of ownership is finished. No more babies. Underneath the construct we begin hearing the deep instinctive knowledge again, and it tells us that we have deep meaning, that we are leaders and that we have a responsibility to lead our tribe towards prosperity and safety.
Look at nature and the way animal groups work, at the matriarchal systems and the role of the older females. Look at elephants and whales. In elephant herds the Matriarch is the most important individual of the group, carrying memories, knowledge and wisdom, while in several species of toothed whales females live for decades after they stop reproducing and older females play an important role in the survival and knowledge of the group.
Masculine and feminine have their places and both are necessary. Matriarchy doesn’t mean suppressing men. Patriarchy is a system, it is not men, and patriarchy is hurtful to everybody. It is based on violence, separation, strongest gets most and the right to use anything for gain.
Matriarchy strives for balance. Masculine energy is support, creating the stability that allows the feminine to be creative in safety.
This is what I explained to the women sitting with me, and they lit up.
The room was filled with warmth and light. There was laughter, deep conversation and much love, and the amount of gratitude they showed me was mind-blowing. They said nobody had ever told them any of this and, until that moment, I had not realised how little women know about the deeper meaning of post-menopause. These women are therapists. I thought they knew.
And when they heard it, they felt it inside. It was like turning on the light.
Something else happened that was beautiful: They found more understanding towards their husbands and wanted to find the balance instead of sitting in anger, realising that men are also victims of society.That matters because the Matriarch isn’t threatened by masculine energy. When a woman begins accessing the original memory of herself, the inherited trauma loses some of its power over her. She begins to belong to herself.
Perhaps the question we need to start asking ourselves is what this time of our lives actually means. It could be another thirty years, there must be more than learning to live with the changes, keeping ourselves healthy and finding ways to stay busy.
This is where we need to go deeper into ourselves, beyond the roles we have lived and the expectations we have carried, and begin finding our own structure and meaning. Somewhere underneath all of that is our deep instinctive role, and when we connect with it, there is no not understanding it. The deep instinctive takes over. It is the ultimate being and it makes the entire system vibrate.
How that expresses itself will be different for every woman. She may take care of children, she may be a writer or a painter, she may build houses. Leadership doesn’t have to look important from the outside. It comes from being who she truly is and bringing that into the tribe.
And to be honest, women have been useful all their lives. We know the downer of that. We know what it feels like when usefulness has become part of how we understand our value. This is something else. This comes from the deepest part of who we are.
I never feared menopause or what came after. To me it was a continuation of life, but there was a certain sense of relief, like I had come out from under a shadow. The shadow was the expectations of the world around me, the sense of failure because I lived my life so differently, and the judgements.
I had huge struggles with the physical bit, but I didn’t allow that to define me. I conquered it, because what are the options?
I grew. I stopped excusing myself and I allowed myself to be exactly who I am.
This is the Inner Queendom, the place where we belong to ourselves again, and from there comes the Matriarch.
If you are sitting in post-menopause feeling unbeautiful, unseen, unvalued and angry, wondering whether there is anything now, you have been given only part of the story. You have been told about what is ending, about the hormones, the symptoms, the ageing and the things you are supposed to have lost, while almost nobody has told you about what you are moving into.
There is a reason for this part of your life, and there is a reason for you.
The Matriarch is not gone. She has been shut down, and now it is time to find her again.
Hit reply and tell me your thoughts. Are you finding your inner Queendom?